The Pleasures of Slow Food: Celebrating Authentic Traditions, Flavors, and Recipes

FOR JA

Who made this,

and everything else,

possible

PHOTOGRAPHER’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Slow Food movement shines a light on the passion and commitment of people throughout the world who continue bringing the traditions of the land and their cultures forward as they have for generations. Bless you all for the privilege and invaluable opportunity to learn and to see into the heart of the unique places you continue to cultivate. I wish to acknowledge these inspired, dedicated people who graciously opened their homes and their lives to us: Roberto Rubino and his farmers; Tom, Giana, and Fingal Ferguson; Elena and Raffaele Rovera; Laura and Franco Bera; the Garibaldis; Franca and her beautiful mother; the wonderfully warm Marino family; Jean-Pierre Grange; the Descoubet family; Jean Lamothe and Marie Lamothe in France; Lothar and Heike in Lübeck; Paul Bertolli; Alice Waters, her assistant Christina, and the amazing chefs Alan, Russell, Gordon, Brian, and their staffs; to Judy Rodgers; June Taylor; Chad and Liz of Bay Village Bakery; Deborah Madison; Inniskillin’s Karl Kaiser and Debra Platt; Michael O’Leary and Robert Hicks in Longboat Key; Ana Sortun in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Cindy and David Major in Vermont; the Dietrich family in Pennsylvania Dutch country; and Daniel Boulud from Daniel.

I would also like to express sincere gratitude for hard work, dedication, support, and perseverance from Judy, Teri, and Anna at my studio, and for perfect assistance from Roderick, Jon K., and David. For Jacqueline’s generosity, and always to Jenna and Kayla for consistent encouragement, tolerance, and unconditional love during the past eight months.

This has been a magical project in every way, provided by my cherished Chronicle Books family, which, for this project was under the guidance and magnificent design of Pamela Geismar, and the editorial vision of Leslie Jonath. And to Corby Kummer for access to a wealth of treasures. Thank you.

—Susie Cushner

Text copyright © 2002 by Corby Kummer. Portions of the text in a different form first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and Gourmet.

Photographs copyright © 2002 by Susie Cushner.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-4521-3380-5

The Library of Congress has previously cataloged

this title under ISBN 0-8118-3379-8

Designed by Pamela Geismar

Typesetting by Kristen Wurz

Chronicle Books LLC

680 Second Street

San Francisco, California 94107

CONTENTS

Preface

Foreword

THE MOVEMENT

What Is Slow Food?

A Charismatic Founder Who Knew How to Have a Good Time

Creating Italy’s Own Michelin Guide

The Decisive Moment: Militating against McDonald’s

Theory into Action: The Ark, the Presidium, and the Slow Food Award

Outward Bound: Slow Food Abroad

The Mecca of the Food World

THE ARTISANS

CHEESE: Roberto Rubino, Italy

CHEESE: Cindy and David Major, Vermont

MEAT: Torsten Kramer, Germany

MEAT: Verna Dietrich, Pennsylvania

SALT: Joäo Navalho, Portugal

SHELLFISH: Michael O’Leary, Florida

WINE: Karl Kaiser, Canada

WINE: André Dubosc, France

FRUIT: Stephen Wood, New Hampshire

VEGETABLES: Jim Gerritsen, Maine

BOTANICAL ARK: Alan and Susan Carle, Australia

THE RECIPES

Marino Family, Mulino Marino, Cossano Belbo, Italy

Garibaldi Family, Cà di Gòsita, Liguria, Italy

Elena Rovera, Cascina del Cornale, Cornale, Italy

Lothar Tubbesing, Restaurant Lachswehr, Lübeck, Germany

Georgette Dubos, Auberge de la Bidouze, Saint-Mont, France

Tom and Giana Ferguson, Schull, County Cork, Ireland

Steve Johnson, The Blue Room, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Ana Sortun, Oleana Restaurant, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Daniel Boulud, Daniel, New York, New York

Ben and Karen Barker, Magnolia Grill, Durham, North Carolina

Rick Bayless, Topolobampo and Frontera Grill, Chicago, Illinois

Deborah Madison, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Alice Waters, Chez Panisse, Berkeley, California

Judy Rodgers, Zuni Café, San Francisco, California

Paul Bertolli, Oliveto Café and Restaurant, Oakland, California

June Taylor, Oakland, California

Elisabeth Prueitt, Tartine, San Francisco, California

Source Guide

Index

Table of Equivalents

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the result of two phone calls. The first came across a scratchy transatlantic wire from Patrick Martins, inviting me to the second Salone del Gusto, in Turin. A young man of relentless charm, Patrick managed to pull me away from the fascinating frenzy of food and artisans and push me into a low-ceilinged, overcrowded press room. An hour spent listening to Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food, turned into five years of study, travel, and dedication to the ideals that I immediately realized I shared that day in Turin.

The second call was from the buoyant Leslie Jonath, at Chronicle Books, who thought that the article I wrote on the Salone for The Atlantic might make a book. She convinced me and her colleagues (a much harder task) that there was a book to be written, one inspired by but independent of the Slow Food movement. Against formidable obstacles, most notably a procrastinating author, Leslie pulled together her team to produce a book every member could be proud of—a tribute to her perseverance and unflagging enthusiasm.

Always inspiring, too, was my soul mate at Slow Food, Cinzia Scaffidi. Her role in this book, as at Slow Food headquarters, is incalculable. Mavi Negro cleared the way for the book to be written and was always its dea ex machina. Also at Slow Food, Laura Bonino, Roby Burdese, Barbara Carrara, Gigi Piumatti, and the Sardo men were unhesitatingly helpful. In New York, Patrick Martins, Serena Di Liberto, and Erika Lesser answered all questions with imagination and incredible speed, and with the help of Dick Bessey persuaded innocent interns to gather the information for the Source Guide.

Eric Schlosser wrote a stirring and eloquent foreword at a particularly busy moment, and gave astute editing suggestions in addition to encouragement and friendship.

Something like the movement itself, the book attracted a group of unlikely collaborators who were exactly right and brought out the best in one another. The first two were no accident. Pamela Geismar, art director of Chronicle, honored us all when she decided to design the book. She asked Susie Cushner to take the pictures—a momentous request. Susie quickly grasped the essence. I’m in awe of the belief, energy, and joy she brought to the book, and of the beautiful design Pamela crafted for it.

Friends told me that there was no better recipe tester in the Bay Area than Tasha Prysi, a former cook at Chez Panisse, but that she would doubtless be unavailable. Upon entering a kitchen to help prepare Chez Panisse’s twenty-fifth anniversary party, I asked the first person I saw how to find the supervising chef. Hi, I’m Tasha, she replied. She was indeed the best choice imaginable, with a great sense of how food should taste and how to put it within range of the home cook. Megan Anthony coordinated the far-flung chefs who so generously donated the book’s recipes.

Sharon Silva offered text-editing guidance both conceptual and line by line. I and the book benefited from her clarity and skill. Carolyn Miller took charge of the precise task of recipe-editing. When I most needed fact-checking and typesetting assistance, two helpmeets miraculously appeared: Jennifer Villeneuve and Caitlin Riley. Each put her all into doing too much work in too little time, and doing it well. Lisa Campbell, at Chronicle, made sure all the pieces fit together.

I could not have dreamed of writing this book without the indulgence and support of the ideal family that is The Atlantic Monthly. They are wonderful friends and colleagues who make life and work a pleasure day by day. My editors at Boston Magazine kindly extended deadlines in the busy last months of book production. Rafe Sagalyn is the model of an agent—wise, encouraging, measured, active when it counts.

I’m deeply grateful to have family and friends who keep me afloat, who bear the interruptions in precious friendship that books mandate. In Italy, north to south: Nicola Turcato, Soly Benveniste, Faith Willinger, Ginevra Bruti-Liberati, the Tondo and Guerra-Watkins clans, Claudio and Benedetta Cavalieri, the bewitching Patience Gray. In the United States, west to east: Pam Hunter and Carl Doumani, Carol Field, Flo Braker, Peggy Pierrepont, the Hershes, Kate Jakobsen, Keith Alexander, the Kummers and the Lavitts, Fred Plotkin, Tony May, Maggie Simmons, Charles Mann, Erika Pilver, Nesli Basgoz, Margo Howard, Sheryl Julian, Ellen Kennelly, Kenneth Mayer, Rux Martin, the families Rosenbloom and Sedgwick, Dorothy Zinberg. Barbara Kafka ever prods me toward emotional and intellectual growth.

I won’t name each of the artisans and chefs who unquestioningly welcomed Susie and me into their lives and souls with amazing, openhanded generosity. I can only hope that this book is an adequate tribute—one that might inspire others to follow their brave and loving example.

—Corby Kummer

PREFACE

EVERY TIME SLOW FOOD ARRIVES IN A NEW country, what happens is an exchange followed by rapid growth. New members learn our philosophy, yes, but the whole movement benefits from new ideas. Our own philosophy becomes more complex and more interesting.

I like the idea that this book arrives in the hands of so many people who don’t yet know Slow Food. I’d like to think they’ll find resonance in the marvelous stories of individual artisans and farmers, and also in the ideas of the movement—a sort of common denominator for their own needs as gourmets, as environmentalists, as people who care about the future of the planet. It’s no longer possible to separate these concerns from the concerns of other people and other places. Everything and everyone are bound up together, today more than ever.

I’m grateful to the publishers of this book for being willing to bet time and money on these ideas of ours. And I sincerely admire—and always view with amused affection—the way the author has studied us over the years, with rigor and curiosity that don’t let up. He is now one of the most effective ambassadors we have in the world. Americans who are already members are sure to recognize in this book everything they know about Slow Food. Readers who are not couldn’t hope for a better guide than our old friend Corby. So here’s to you, Corby, and the success of your comprehensive, beautifully written chronicle of our movement.

—Carlo Petrini

President, Slow Food

FOREWORD

WHEN YOU ORDER A HAMBURGER, FRENCH FRIES, and a cola from a fast-food restaurant, here’s what you’re likely to get: A paper cup full of carbonated water, ice, sugar, corn syrup, food coloring, and natural flavor. Frozen fries that were flavored with chemical additives, reheated in hydrogenated vegetable oil, salted, then placed beneath a heat lamp. A thin, frozen hamburger patty—containing meat from hundreds of different cattle, raised in as many as five different countries, ground together in gigantic vats at a distant processing plant—reheated on an automated grill. The ketchup and the pickle also contain flavor additives, manufactured at high-tech specialty chemical plants off the New Jersey Turnpike.

When you eat this meal, it tastes pretty good. It was carefully formulated to taste good. But twenty or thirty minutes later, there’s an odd aftertaste, a subtle reminder that this food isn’t like the food you make from scratch in your own kitchen. Fast food is an industrial commodity, assembled by machines out of parts shipped from various factories. In many ways it has more in common with a toaster oven or a fluorescent lamp than it does with a home-cooked meal. Bon appétit.

The Slow Food movement stands in direct opposition to everything that a fast-food meal represents: blandness, uniformity, conformity, the blind worship of science and technology. The McDonald’s Corporation has a slogan, One Taste Worldwide, that perfectly encapsulates the stultifying, homogenizing effects of its global empire. Why would anyone want to live in such a world? What conceivable motive, other than the profit motive, would drive anyone to pursue one taste so ruthlessly? If fast food is the culinary equivalent of a sound bite, then Slow Food is an honest, thorough declaration of intent. Many tastes are better than one, this new movement says.

Critics of Slow Food claim that it is elitist and effete, too expensive for ordinary people, just the latest trend among foodies and gourmands. I would use a different set of adjectives to describe the movement: necessary and long overdue. Slow Foods are mainly peasant foods—dishes and ingredients that have been prepared the same way for centuries. They are time-tested. They spring directly from regional cultures and cuisines. They are not effete. Fast food stems from an entirely different sort of mass culture and mass production. It is a recent phenomenon. Although McDonald’s has been around for more than half a century, it did not begin to rely on highly processed, frozen meals until the early 1970s. The centralization and industrialization of our food system has largely occurred over the past twenty years. And its huge social costs—the rise in food-borne illnesses, the advent of new pathogens such as E. coli 0157:H7, antibiotic resistance from the overuse of drugs in animal feed, extensive water pollution from feedlot wastes, and many others—have become apparent only recently. These costs are not reflected in the price of a burger and fries at the drive-through window. But they should be. Our fast, cheap food has proven to be much too expensive.

Corby Kummer is the ideal author to write about Slow Food. He can speak with great authority not just about food but also about politics, law, public-health issues, history, and literature. More important, he has good taste. Kummer understands the Slow Food movement’s rationale, has long supported its aims, and is immune to hype.

Fast-food chains like McDonald’s are a creation of the late twentieth century, and their charmless, plastic, bureaucratic worldview is rapidly becoming obsolete. People are beginning to realize that no industry is more important than the food industry. That all of human civilization is dependent on the ability to produce and consume the right foods. That what you eat defines you, intrinsically. The change from a disposable society to a sustainable one begins with the first bite. If you care about these things and all their implications, you will want to savor The Pleasures of Slow Food.

—Eric Schlosser

THE MOVEMENT

GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI HANDS WHITE-HOT CERAMIC saucers to his mother, Maria Ines D’Amico, who is hunched over the hearth of a wood-burning fireplace so big it has its own little house. The hearth stands across from the shipshape stucco house of their family farm, at the top of a steep hillside in Liguria, on the Italian Riviera. Wearing a white gauze cap that keeps her long white hair away from the embers on the hot, hot stone floor and sets off the handsome features of her wide face, Maria Ines ladles just enough thin batter to coat the bottom of the saucer—a mold with an intricate raised pattern for testaroli, a kind of crepe famous in this part of paradise.

She stacks the saucers in piles of four on the hearth, expertly keeping them moving with iron tongs. Every so often she checks the two other dishes in the oven, both of them cooking in wide, shallow, time-battered aluminum pans covered by terra-cotta cloches that look like they might have been designed by Gaudi. To see into the pans, one of them holding a veal-and-potato stew and the other a huge round of bread that rises to fill the cloche, Maria Ines signals her son. He turns a crank connected to a chain that lifts each cover straight up, releasing the fragrances of rosemary and fresh-baked bread.

When Maria Ines judges the crepes done—when bubbles come to the surface